


The Soul-Farer

by itsmoonpeaches



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: 100 Year War (Avatar TV), Air Nomad Genocide (Avatar), Air Nomads (Avatar), Airbending & Airbenders, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Blood, F/M, Katara (Avatar)-centric, Minor Character Death, Minor Violence, POV Katara (Avatar), Southern Water Tribe, Spirit World, Spirit World (Avatar), Spirits, Spiritual, Surviving Air Nomads (Avatar), War, Water Tribe(s) (Avatar), Waterbending & Waterbenders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:33:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28851384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsmoonpeaches/pseuds/itsmoonpeaches
Summary: Once when Katara was five-years-old, she asked for a story about the Air Nomads to help her fall asleep.Hers was a culture of storytelling, of oral tradition that even the children found sacred to their people. It was the waters of their life, the legends and folktales that had to be told because there was no need to write them down when they had their songs and their words.From the great dancing Southern Lights where the spirits played in the festivals each year, to the Mother of the Ocean who complimented the moon. There were the tales of the folk of the highlands, those who had given themselves into nature and lived as shapeshifting beings that could change from animal to animal. Everything had a spirit, a soul. The weather, the mountainside, the iceberg that bobbed erratically upon the rough waters in the edges of a storm.-Or, Katara and Aang meet as children, and together they learn to live.
Relationships: Aang & Katara (Avatar), Aang & Sokka (Avatar), Aang/Katara (Avatar), Hakoda & Katara (Avatar), Katara & Kya (Avatar), Katara & Sokka (Avatar)
Comments: 30
Kudos: 84
Collections: Canon Ship Fics of AtLA





	1. Part I

**Author's Note:**

> Alright so this thing is crazy. This was supposed to be a oneshot. As you can see, this is not a oneshot. It's now a two-parter. Why? Because if I didn't split it up, the story would give everyone whiplash.
> 
> I would also like to note that this was inspired by Pixar's Soul and by a prompt from  
> emotionalmarlee on Tumblr where they said:  
> idk if you’ve done this alr but #26 for the dialogue prompts “it was you the whole time” with kataang would rejuvenate my soul🥺🤲🏾
> 
> Anyway, happy reading!

Once when Katara was five-years-old, she asked for a story about the Air Nomads to help her fall asleep.

Hers was a culture of storytelling, of oral tradition that even the children found sacred to their people. It was the waters of their life, the legends and folktales that had to be told because there was no need to write them down when they had their songs and their words.

From the great dancing Southern Lights where the spirits played in the festivals each year, to the Mother of the Ocean who complimented the moon. There were the tales of the folk of the highlands, those who had given themselves into nature and lived as shapeshifting beings that could change from animal to animal. Everything had a spirit, a soul. The weather, the mountainside, the iceberg that bobbed erratically upon the rough waters in the edges of a storm.

Said the elders of the tribe, “Everything is connected.” Katara struggled to understand this, even at such a young age. She knew in her heart that they had to be right, because Gran Gran was never wrong. And neither was her mother.

“Close your eyes, Katara, and think of nothing else but the sky,” said her mother. Kya looked down on her, expression soft. The slivered light of the candles that slipped past the flap of the entrance of hers and her brother’s section of their ice-made home limned her face.

“But _why_ the sky, mom?” Katara asked, pouting. She sunk further into her bed pallet.

She felt her mother’s finger poke the point of her cold nose. “Ah, ah,” she laughed, tucking the pelts around Katara more snugly. “If we’re going to get you to drift off to sleep like your brother, then you have to listen to mom, right?”

She could hear Sokka snoring just on the other side of her. For a little boy, he was louder than her dad and a polar bear dog combined. She swore his snore echoed throughout the entire city. She should have been annoyed, but all she could hear after a while was the gentle humming of her mother’s lullaby tune.

As she shut her eyes, she saw midnight as it engulfed her in the shower of shooting stars, icebergs gliding on the glassy waters of the still ocean, feathered clouds above her like brushstrokes on Earth Kingdom rice paper.

Kya was always so full of stories to tell, just as Katara’s grandmother was. This was their routine almost every night, especially when Katara could not bring herself to sleep. She was constantly restless when the sun went down, especially when the full moon rose. Gran Gran told her that it was her waterbender spirit, and she could believe it. The other waterbenders in the Southern Water Tribe seemed to have the same problem. Sometimes, she would find one or two outside just as the evening set in and she and her brother were finishing their chores. They practiced their forms in the frozen fountain square and near the floes. It was often when the day had gone.

Kya told her about the Northern Water Tribe, how female waterbenders there could only heal, how they did not have the choice to be protectors of Agna Qel’a if they wanted. Katara always thought there was nothing freer than being a waterbender like she was, and she could not imagine a life in which she could not both heal and protect like she wanted.

Still, sometimes she was told stories of other peoples and cultures as well. She liked the imagery of the Fire Nation’s dragons that breathed rainbows of flame, of the Earth Kingdom’s Si Wong Desert and the tall tale that an all-powerful knowledge spirit had hidden its treasures underneath the rolling sands. She was not sure if she really believed them all because they sounded too magnificent to be real.

But her favorite stories other than those of her tribe were the ones of the Air Nomads.

“You are in luck if ever you meet an airbender, Katara,” her mother began as Katara used her inspiration to portray the scenes of them behind her eyelids. “If you listen carefully, they always give you wonderful wisdom.”

An Air Nomad was a benediction, a charm, upon their land. This was a belief that held true throughout the world. The people of the Southern Water Tribe found themselves feeling above the travesties of the rest of the nations if only for their proximity to the Southern Air Temple. They were luckier still to have so much interaction with the Air Nomads. Not many other trade ports could say as much. However, Katara and her brother were not allowed to stray far from the settlement. Her father said once that the ships that docked at the port carried men from other countries and customs, and while that was welcomed, sometimes the things they brought were heavy and dangerous. “A trade port is no place for a child,” he had warned.

Katara had yet to meet an Air Nomad. One day, she thought she might. Perhaps that was why she was so interested in them.

“In fact, I was told by my mother that an Air Nomad was the one who blessed her to have her first child. Me,” said Kya. Katara could hear the smile in her voice. “They’re spiritual people, you know. Connected in ways that even we as the people of the moon and ocean, can never hope to imagine. Even, some say, so connected to the Spirit World that they can be soul-farers.”

“Why?” Katara whispered, letting only the barest breath leave her lips. She did not want to break the magic of it all.

Her mother chuckled above her. “The Air Nomads detached themselves from worldly concerns, and that gave them peace and freedom,” she said, just as quietly. After a pause, she added, “They are a rare sight in some of the other nations, but they are freer than the wind itself, and all of them are so spiritual that they are all airbenders.”

Kya continued to tell her tales that sounded bigger than the Patola Mountains. How the airbenders could fly with just a staff with fabric wings, how a farmer had asked for an airbender’s blessing when his crops would not grow, how Avatar Yangchen who was the last Air Nomad Avatar was so respected because she used her people’s teachings to create balance in the world through negotiation and words.

“…and they say that since Avatar Roku was from the Fire Nation, the Avatar now has to be an Air Nomad to follow the next nation in the cycle. Can you imagine? An Air Nomad as our Avatar.” 

Katara fell asleep to the soothing sound of her mother’s voice, and dreams of flying people with wonderful orange wings in the open skies.

* * *

Katara did not _mean_ to lose Sokka. She had been curious, that was all. So, what if their parents told them to do this one simple errand together?

Hakoda may have been their father, but he was also the chief of the Southern Water Tribe. He often did not have time to go pick up the fish baskets from the market, and Kya had gone with their grandmother to help with an emergency at the healing huts. Apparently, there was a mother who was giving birth that did not realize she had been so heavily pregnant because she was having triplets.

Katara giggled at the thought of Sokka almost fainting at having witnessed a tiger seal birthing a few weeks back. If she had to guess, that was why she and her brother had been sent out on a separate task for a few hours. For a ten-year-old, her brother was such a coward. She was only a year younger than him, and she prided herself in being a lot braver than he was.

Still, nothing could quench her desire to see past the boundaries of her home and the capital, Oqaatsut. She supposed she had an adventurous spirit, and she knew it was because of her mother. Her stories, the tales of her travels to different islands and nations…one day she wanted to experience them all.

It had been years since she had first heard about people from other countries, yet she was relegated to the block of ice she called her home. Not that her brother minded. He seemed to be the opposite to her on that front. Her was perfectly fine with “protecting the people” as he always parroted from their father. He was in line to be the chief since he was the oldest. Katara was only interested in perfecting her waterbending and going around the world to do it.

That day, it was color that distracted her and brought her far away from where her brother was. The new thing from the outside world that ignited her curiosity, caused her to scuttle away like a snow crab on the beach and away from its home. Her search for adventure led her to follow the strange bright shadow that lightened the sky. It was a mere flap of auburn fabric, what many had referred to as a shade of autumn. There was extraordinarily little outside winter that she saw, but away from the blues and whites of her home, she recognized the novelty.

It was a ragged piece that billowed on a breezy stream, journeying just above the market stalls and over the walls that led to the harbor. Perhaps what she should have done was listen to her Gran Gran’s warnings when she was trying to be wise, “Curiosity killed the koala-otter, Katara. Do not stray where we cannot find you.” But, as always, she did not.

Against all odds, she found herself following it, climbing over snow dunes and eventually a terribly erected wall. Her waterbending aided her without her asking, like her body knew what she wanted without the need of a command.

And then, the furthest away from Oqaatsut she had ever been, she heard someone shout, “Please! Can you help my friend? He’s hurt!” It was the voice of a child, a boy if she was right.

She crested upon a hill, and beyond that was tundra. Flat, colorless, and icy, with no other interruptions besides the melded shape of the boy and a strange creature she had never seen before.

Katara stopped before them, her tracks trailing behind her as patterns in the snow. The piece of orange fabric landed somewhere behind her, and she saw the same color dyed the clothes of this boy before her now. His robes had yellows in them too, the sleeves and pants long with the same hue, and a drape of orange around his shoulders that dangled right above a matching belt. He looked to be younger than her by at least a year or two. He was bald and had a round, kind-looking face that seemed smaller than it probably was with the high collar that encircled his neck. He was paler than her dark olive tone, but not pasty. Rather, a little pink on the nose and the tips of his ears. She wondered how he was not cold without a parka.

Just behind him was an animal with light fur and brown arrow markings on its body that ended at a point on its head. It was about the size of a polar bear dog. Its horns were slight, blunted, and its big black eyes told her that this must have been a calf of some kind. It was endearing to look at, except for the fact that one of its six legs was crooked into an awkward angle.

She stared at the boy and his companion for a long moment before he broke the silence first.

“Are you from Oqaatsut?” he asked, voice high and innocent. “My friend needs a healer, please.” His bottom lip wobbled.

Instead of a proper answer, Katara replied, “Who’s your friend?”

The boy blinked, his light eyes wide. They were a color she had never seen before, certainly not the azures and ceruleans of her people. “He’s Appa, my flying bison,” he said. He took a deep breath, eyebrows crinkling on his forehead. “It was our first long flight and, well…”

Katara did not understand what that meant, nor did she fully grasp that this boy had implied that he and Appa had the ability to fly through the air. The great beast had cracked open a pained eye, the pupil sparkling sadly in the sunlight.

She felt a tug in her stomach, a pull. She reached forward without thinking. She never broke eye contact as her arms lifted and the snow followed her every movement like the swirl of a dance. Powder white engulfed her palms. She pressed them to the broken leg as she heard a gasp from beside her.

The boy, maybe? She did not know.

She felt a tingling sensation. Her hands glowed.

And then, without preamble, the snow turned to liquid and liquid into vapor. It curled away from her, a mist that transformed into rising imperfect tendrils upon her gloved skin. The beating glow disappeared with it, and soon she was falling back onto the ground with something like astonishment resounding within her chest.

Appa moved in an instant, standing on all six legs with a groan. The boy yelped, clapping his hands to his heart, and he was hugging his friend with all the energy he could muster.

“Oh, thank you, thank you!” he exclaimed. He helped her stand. Then he embraced her as well. “You’re a healer! You’re amazing!”

Not knowing what else to do, Katara put her arms around him too and patted him on the back. She laughed nervously and said, “I didn’t know I’m a healer.”

The boy looked at her just before pulling away, grinning. “I’m glad you figured it out!” he laughed. He paused to bow his head slightly and introduced himself. “I’m Aang. I’m from the Southern Air Temple.”

She was so shocked, that the words that rushed from her mouth were nothing short of dumbfounded. “You’re an airbender!” she gasped.

“Sure am!” he said with the brightest smile. “And you’re a waterbender!”

Katara caught the teasing glint in his eye and felt the flush as it rose to her cheeks. She cleared her throat and added, “I’m Katara from Oqaatsut of the Southern Water Tribe.”

Appa inched forward and she was startled when she felt the rough and wet texture of a large tongue on the side of her face. She recoiled, and Aang burst out into a fit of laughter. She did not know what came over her, because she found the situation so ridiculous that she joined in with him, holding her middle as she bent over with mirth.

She led Aang into the city, listening to his fantastical tales about his friends and playing airball on teams of three on each side, balancing on poles, whisking hollow whicker balls from one person to another. She told him of the games she and Sokka played, of snowball fights with the other children, and how she was learning to waterbend from Master Uki who was famously known as the Great Survivor.

“Mom says that people call her that because she was trapped in a blizzard once on the ocean all alone and came back alive with nothing but an ice canoe that she made!” Katara said with wonder.

The walls appeared, grand and obtuse. Silly, she thought, after the vast tundra that drifted far behind them. The shaking ground with Appa’s every step should have alarmed her, but instead it was a steady thrum as they entered the city walls. Frantic sentries that stood at the lookout points waved down at her, and Katara realized that she must have been missing for a long while.

She was met, unceremoniously, with the worried face of her father staring down at her. He blocked their path to go further into the city, and normally Katara would have been concerned about a scolding if not for the curious man that stood next to him. He looked to be an elder, and was shaven just like Aang, except he had thin white eyebrows and a bushy mustache that dangled just below his chin. His robes were looser, less formfitting, with a higher collar and draped orange. Around his neck was a beaded wooden necklace that had a large round pendant with a trio of swirls that Katara recognized as the symbol for the Air Nomads. He was paler than Aang and had a grandfatherly expression that was only broken by the stark blue arrow tattoo that arced onto his forehead from the back of his neck. When Katara looked closer, she saw that he had some peeking through his sleeves onto his hands as well.

“Aang!” the man exclaimed, running to the boy in question and scooping him into his arms. “I was so worried when Nana and I lost you two on that wind current!”

“Gyatso!” rejoiced Aang. He reached his short arms around the older man. “Appa broke his leg, but he’s okay now!” He whipped around, gesturing with enthusiasm in her direction. “Katara is a healer!”

It was then that her father interjected, snapping himself out of whatever trance he had been in when their eyes had met. “You’re a healer?” he asked, his voice laced with awe. It was uncommon, she had heard, that a waterbender could heal. Not rare, but only some had the capability. Katara did not have time to process her newfound ability yet.

The conversation evolved into something else, and soon the frustrations that Katara had strayed far from Oqaatsut melted away in favor of a blossoming friendship.

She thought what a sight they must have made, a pair of Air Nomads, the chief and his young daughter, and a flying bison meandering their way into the city. Merchants and workers gave them curious looks, but all Katara had time to concentrate on was the fact that she had finally met an Air Nomad.

She and Aang talked about everything and nothing, and Katara almost forgot that Aang and his guardian had been invited into their home for supper. Appa sat out in the back where he made a place for himself in a warm shed full of dried imported hay that they usually used for arctic camels.

Sokka got along with Aang just as well as she did, and the boys took turns making a game out of guessing which dish on the table Hakoda would pick next. “I bet the ocean kumquats!” laughed her brother, and Aang retorted with something else, and occasionally pointed at the halibut for good measure. 

She noticed that Aang and Gyatso avoided touching the meats and fish, and when she asked, they explained that Air Nomads were vegetarian. “Every life is sacred, even the life of the tiniest spider fly caught in its own web,” shared Gyatso in between bites.

“No meat?!” cried Sokka, and their mother smacked him on the back of the sorry excuse of his Warrior’s Wolf Tail—a ponytail if Katara ever saw one—for being rude. Gran Gran gave him a long, hard glare that she could not help but snigger at.

Gyatso chuckled from across the table, the flames of the hearth in the center of their home flickering to highlight the corners of his mouth. “Don’t worry, young one,” he placated him. “Just because our people believe one thing does not mean we don’t also respect that other people have other ways to live. An animal’s life might be sacred, but yours is as well.”

Somehow, she felt comforted by the wisdom of the words.

The two of them stayed for another few days, and Aang watched with wonder as she showed him her waterbending by the fountain. Even more so when Master Uki marveled at the fact that Aang told her that Katara could now heal.

She felt a little sad when Aang told her they had to return to the air temple but promised her that he would keep in touch and write.

She watched as Gyatso waved and called for Nana, and Katara realized that Nana was not a person, but a far larger, adult, female flying bison. She soared through the clouds like a graceful leaf riding the breeze and landed before them with a _thud._ She had bright green eyes that had speckles of amber in the irises, and longer, curved horns. She must have been ten tons or more in size.

“I’ll see you soon!” beamed Aang.

After all, this was the year he was permitted to travel, to be a nomad like his people, he told her. It was a part of his coming of age. “It’s my World Year,” he said with the characteristic smile of his. “I get to start seeing all the other nations! When I’m old enough, I can do it by myself!”

When Katara expressed that she too wanted to see what was beyond her sea, he said, “Maybe one day we could go together.”

And at that moment her heart was full of only the optimism and warmth she imagined someone could have when they were offered a song for every night and every moon.

“Okay,” she said, and they separated.

The airbenders were black specks in the painted sky, floating away like snow flurries on a twilit morning. Brilliant, beautiful, alive. She could not wait to see him again.

-

The Air Nomads continued to come to their port to trade fruit pies for timber carvings, lychee nuts for bushels of dried seaweed. Never for the freshest catch of the day, nor for the furs that made up the linings of Katara’s clothing. They traded in stories, in kernels of truth, in blessings that sighed away the curses that a bitter man would think of his neighbor.

She was the happiest when she saw him. The boy. Aang was peculiar in the Water Tribes, what with his yellows and his oranges. The vividness that shone as the sun would against the ice. Somehow, her parents allowed her to traverse outside the walls if she was with Aang, and that lifted her spirits until she was brimming with joy.

He came every few months, and he made it a point to finish his World Year with her. That day when he turned eight, they finished the autumn equinox with toasts of Labrador tea, warm against their cool palms, watching Appa prance through the oblong structures of honeycombed icecaps that dotted the harbor. He shared a pack of fire flakes with her, a crunchy delicacy that he became fond of when visiting the Fire Nation. He told her of Kuzon, a friend he had just met, and their wild adventure to save a dragon’s egg from poachers.

The spicy heat of the fire flakes warmed her to her toes. When she glanced over at him, she noticed how content he seemed to sip on his tea. The pot chilled between them on the vacant dock they sat on.

She smiled at him and lifted her hand. When he looked to her, she opened her fingers and revealed a beaded bracelet. It was simple; she was not yet well-versed in beadwork. But she was proud of it. The beads were made of soft stone and dyed with arctic berries into hues of blue and purple. They were rounded, uneven, and knotted together with a strip of thick cloth that she had found in her grandmother’s things. Of course, she had asked for permission first.

“It’s for you,” she offered. “Happy birthday.”

He allowed her to tie it onto his right wrist. “Wow,” he said. “I’ve never had a birthday gift before.”

“Really?” she asked, surprised.

He shook his head. “We usually celebrate birthdays together at the end of the month, and we have a feast, but it’s fun,” he replied.

“Well,” Katara chimed, “Now it’s more fun. It’s fun to get surprised.”

She remembered her mother’s stories, of how beads kept the dark spirits away, and she told him. She remembered most of all that he was special to her. A friend from the outside world, someone whose letters she looked forward to every week when they came.

He was a cheerful spark upon the sapped hills, the white, the snow, the shades of faded blue that shimmered upon the sleek surface of frozen and refrozen ice. He continued to come with the other Air Nomads often, just sitting there on the back of a great flying bison. He came with Gyatso who she found out was also his mentor, and taught Aang whatever airbending skills Katara supposed he needed to learn throughout his acolyte life.

She would often wonder where they all went after they visited, the other airbenders. The peaceful people with shaved heads and blue arrow tattoos that were painted along the chi paths on their skin. (“Master airbender tattoos, young one,” Gyatso had informed her. “To honor the first airbenders and our companions, the sky bison.”) She found them different and loved their differences. She loved how free they were especially in comparison to the Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, and Northern Water Tribe delegates that came and went.

Sometimes, she and Aang would include Sokka who taught Aang how to forage on the tundra and to hide his tracks that appeared in the snow. Other times, Kya would join in and teach the three of them to find the best mountain black berries hidden in the craggiest alcoves.

“See,” Kya told them during one visit, “the darker they are, the better they are for dye work.”

“And these ones are the best for eating!” shouted Sokka, and they all snickered together.

Afterwards, the four of them devised a prank that would trick her father and grandmother into thinking that that they had run into polar dogs that ate their stash of berries before they could bring them all home. Kya was the one who tore fake scratches into their spare rucksack.

They doubled over with laughter when Gyatso decided that he wanted to hide the berries in the fish baskets, only for Gran Gran to scream in terror when she thought she had stuck her hand into a particularly bloody cod when it was just berry juice. (“Kya, you are worse than my son for condoning this behavior!”)

Every time he visited, Aang was cheerful and sociable. He and Gyatso brought her family closer together. Impossibly so. He made friends with all the children that spoke with him, but for some reason he never stopped making the most time for her.

He brought back a handful of samara seeds, and for the first time she knew what it was like to play with nature other than snow. She watched as they threw them in the air and like miniature whirligigs, they spun down to the ground. She laughed and she laughed. She offered him seaweed stew, and he marveled at the taste, the flavor, the sour bits at the end. They learned about each other and each other’s cultures as the months passed.

“Your eyes are pretty,” Aang told her during the early summer while they were outside observing the midnight sun. He was staring at her.

She felt her face flush then, a red-hot tint that she was sure her older brother would make fun of if he could see it. But he was off playing warriors with friends that were his age. No one had called any part of her _pretty_ before, not if it was not her mother, father, or grandmother. Somehow, this kind of compliment felt different.

“I like your eyes too,” she responded, feeling a little shy. She told the truth with everything she had, and she believed it. He had the kind of eyes that were silver like starlight, that twinkled when the sunshine hit them at just the right angle. She did not know what else to say.

They were quiet for a time, but it was not uncomfortable. The sun edged the horizon line, teasing a dip below the rippling waters but never doing so. The moon was more than a quarter full, visible at the peak of the clear sky.

“Kuzon says there’s this comet festival that happens every hundred years in the Fire Nation at the end of this summer,” Aang said, breaking the silence. “Gyatso says we can see it if the Council of Elders says we can.”

“Wow,” replied Katara. “I want to see it too.”

He grinned and said, “I can ask if your family wants to come?”

“Yeah! Mom would love it!”

After that, they giggled, planning for an escapade and what types of things they would pack. He said there was supposed to be all kinds of dances and music, choreography to an instrument he called a tsungi horn. She could only imagine what it sounded like.

When they went back to her home for lunch, it was the first time her father said yes to anything that involved traveling. Gyatso said they would pick up her family the day before the comet festival in the early morning. Hakoda added that it would be a terrific opportunity for him to make good on his trade agreement with Fire Lord Sozin’s commerce minister. 

They went off to go penguin sledding with full bellies and playful laughs. She yelled his name as she hurried after him, slipping and sliding down a hillside, riding on the wafts of the frigid air. Sokka came along with reluctance but had a great time anyway. Kya offered to watch them and cheered them on from the bottom of the slopes, sneaking them a new mackerel when they needed to lure in an otter penguin.

Then, when it was time for Aang to leave, she fell into a now practiced routine. He lifted his hand, waved goodbye, told her he would see her soon. “At the end of summer,” he said. “It’ll be great!”

“I can’t wait!” she cheered.

Her first taste of freedom. But maybe that was not the right thing to call it. No, it was her first true adventure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some notes:
> 
> -Uki is an Inuit name I found meaning "survivor".  
> -Oqaatsut is the name of a real town in Greenland that used to be called Rhodebay. Its name means "cormorant".  
> -The beads lore is influenced by real Greenlandic tales. More to come on that later.  
> -The tales and stories Katara mentions early on in the story about the souls in the mountains are also influenced by real Greenlandic stories.


	2. Part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was only a week before the comet festival that she received last minute correspondence from Aang. She took the scroll from the messenger who had delivered it with a hasty bow and hurried over to the privacy of the room she and her brother shared.
> 
> In the semi-darkness, Katara’s hands shook when she unrolled the letter, anticipation consuming her as it always had when she saw Aang’s slanted handwriting.
> 
> -
> 
> Or, summer arrives and Katara sees the comet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a lot. This part is the reason this oneshot became 2 parts. You'll see why. I'd also like to say that this is labeled "soulmates," but while that is technically true, it is unconventional. 
> 
> I'm also realizing that this is kind of a love letter to cultures with oral traditions. If you're from one those cultures, this is for you.
> 
> Warning for minor blood and violence.

“Our strength comes from the moon. Our life comes from the Mother of the Ocean. These spirits work together to keep balance,” Master Uki told Katara. It was something she repeated from the very first day it was discovered that Katara was a waterbender. 

This was what Katara lived by. This was her creed, her way of life. She was the tug of the moon, the complexity of the sea. Waterbending was not something that everyone could be blessed with, she knew that, and because of this it was a skill she cherished.

As many before her, she had found she could bend by accident. She had wanted so badly to reach her brother and mother when they were practicing rowing the family boat. Hakoda had been busy with Bato as they tried to quell a dispute between two villages closer to the South Pole. That left Kya to take up lessons for the day, and since Sokka was the older sibling, he had the privilege of learning the basics of rowing first.

She had been only five, and her brother six, but she insisted that she was old enough for anything.

Her desire had been so strong that the kayak was pulled toward her through the still waters. She had angrily blown away the loops of hair on either side of her face and stuck her arms out. She had not realized what she had been doing until both her mother and Sokka were screaming at her to stop.

Master Uki took it as a sign that she would be a strong bender, as most of the time children found their abilities by losing control of their bending and causing something to explode. The fact that she had already showed proficiency in the pulling aspect of waterbending meant that Katara could be a prodigy, she had said.

Uki was a middle-aged woman with streaks of graying hair that was braided back into a long tail. Her cerulean eyes were kind, but her face was hard, serious. In a way, she reminded Katara of Kya. Despite not having children of her own, she was just as motherly.

“Remember Katara,” Master Uki reminded her in one of her early lessons. “Though water is gentle, it can also be as dangerous as the deep of the sea. The Mother of the Ocean allows us life. Our food, the tiger seals that sustain us, the clothes on our back…she gifts us with the things she is denied.

“Our ancestors watched as the Spirit of the Moon pushed and pulled the tides and learned to do it themselves. We depend on them, these spirits. As a waterbender, you must understand their balance in this world. Like many things, they cannot exist without the other. And like water, you are to be both the steady stream and the raging sea.”

Katara watched closely from then on how the sailors and hunters tossed their worn harpoon-heads, and leftover morsels of meat or broken bones into the salty waters. Offerings, they said, for the Mother of the Ocean. They would give what was due to a spirit that could not provide for herself.

Katara had started to wonder what it felt like to want something she could not have, and to wait for someone else to find it for her.

* * *

It was only a week before the comet festival that she received last minute correspondence from Aang. She took the scroll from the messenger who had delivered it with a hasty bow and hurried over to the privacy of the room she and her brother shared.

In the semi-darkness, Katara’s hands shook when she unrolled the letter, anticipation consuming her as it always had when she saw Aang’s slanted handwriting. She marveled at how well-formed his characters were for a kid. Perhaps that had to do with the study and discipline the Air Nomads seemed to have when it came to ancient texts. Even hers were never so neat. Not to mention Sokka’s were unreadable.

_Katara,_

_I’m sorry. Something’s happened. The Elders say we can’t go to the festival anymore. I don’t know why, and Gytaso won’t tell me._

_Please don’t be mad._

_—Aang_

There were smudged words on the paper, and the strokes attached to some characters were sloppy. It was so unlike him. It was as if he had written her in a hurry. She clutched the paper to her chest and sunk to the floor.

Her mother found her like that an hour later, took the letter to read from her hands, and when she was finished, she coaxed Katara into eating a sweet tart that that been traded from the Southern Air Temple. She was reminded for a moment that Aang had helped to bake some of them.

She kept herself busy studying with Master Uki. She wanted to practice the Water Whip so that she could show Aang when he returned.

The days went by, and then the moment finally arrived.

The last day of summer came as a whisper would, silent and whirring through the hills like an arctic rooster’s twittering at sunrise. The heavens were brighter than usual—even brighter than the midnight sun—as if the feeling of night never settled in.

“Come hunting with us,” Hakoda suggested as he woke her early at the crack of dawn. She could see the concern written on the creases of her father’s face. She knew he was only trying to cheer her up. “Sokka and I could use your waterbending to catch a few more fish, huh?”

She complied, but only because she wanted a distraction.

The three of them trekked through the slippery rocks, packed dirt crunching under their sealskin boots. Even though it was summer, it only meant that it was warm enough that there were fewer icebergs and less ice. The sun never set, and she could wear thinner layers if she wanted. To her, this was what summer meant. At least there were animals to hunt.

When they made it to the floes where there were caves that appeared at low tide, the sky was scorched dark cerise and the sea was as red as blood. Even the normally pristine icebergs were swathed in it, the deep presence of something magnificent percolating into every surface, every pore.

The wildlife seemed restless. Whole flocks flew above their heads to somewhere in the west. Otter penguins waddled away into their broods and disappeared into the ocean. Only a few stragglers remained.

Hakoda dropped an old, blunted spearhead into the water, observing as it sunk to the bottom. Then, he unlatched the bow at his back, directing Sokka to watch his every movement. There was a quiver he kept with specialized bird arrows, barbed at the tips. He was silent with every twitch he made.

The bird arrow loosed through the air. _Shling,_ it went, and pierced the seafowl that coasted atop the briny waves. The creature did not even make a sound as it died, floating upon the water that had housed its food. 

Katara controlled a bulb of water and surrounded the carcass so that they could keep their prey. She felt sick. She never did before when she had come with them to help.

The water was the lifeblood that drained from the bird, and the clouds its stained black feathers. Something thrummed behind the haze, pushing them aside, and a fiery ball broke the stratosphere apart.

The comet was beautiful, she thought as she tugged at another dead bird. Beautiful and lonely.

-

“Mom and dad are fighting about something,” Sokka whispered urgently into her ear a few days after the comet came.

It was late and the room darkening curtains had already been drawn tight to block out the sunlight. They were supposed to be sleeping. She had been close to it before her brother interrupted.

“They fight sometimes,” she mumbled into her pallet’s pillow. “Go to sleep, Sokka.”

He shook her shoulder with increasing determination. “No, listen Katara,” he insisted. “I think it’s something big.”

Grumbling, she followed him to the entrance of their section of their home where they placed their ears to the door flap. She could hear raised voices, but that was not what startled her. It was the fact that her father sounded scared.

“You can’t hide it from them forever, Kya!” he shouted. “It’s coming, and it’s coming fast. The couriers from the Earth Kingdom and Agna Quel’a are terrified. Everyone will know.”

Her mother’s voice came through like the crackle of thunder. “If we can protect them for just a little while longer—”

“War is coming,” started Hakoda, cutting off Kya. “There will be nothing we can do to keep them from this. We will have to fight!”

“Your _warriors_ will have to fight!”

There was some shuffling, and something that sounded like the banging of a fist onto a table. Katara jumped and Sokka shushed her.

“I understand why you’re worried. I do. But we haven’t had a conflict like this in generations,” growled Hakoda. “Not since our ancestors had to guard our borders from pirate raiders of the Fifth Nation during Avatar Kyoshi’s time. But this is different. If it is anything like the previous chiefs have written, there will be nowhere, and no one left untouched.”

“Hakoda…” began Kya, words trembling.

There was a pause, a calm before the storm, and a sweet-toned whisper Katara could not hear.

After, her father sounded different, tired. Like all the fight had been drained from him. “The Air Nomads were wiped out,” he sighed in response. Still, everything he said was tinged with steel. “Sozin sent his armies during the comet festival that enhanced their firebending to unimaginable power. The other nations are angry, and so are we. The Air Nomads were pacifists, and friends to all of us. What we have lost here is huge…and they were all killed because of Sozin’s horrifying tactic.

They were looking for the Avatar. Avatar Roku died only nine years ago. If the Avatar _was_ at one of the temples, they are most likely dead. The Fire Nation will be after the Water Tribes next, looking for the Avatar here. We need to be prepared. The Earth Kingdom has already been hit on their western front and…”

Everything else blurred after that. There was ringing in Katara’s ears, cotton stuffed into them. “The Air Nomads were wiped out,” repeated over and over again in her head. Like a nightmare she could not escape. Like there were people bellowing the truth of it at her as she stood in the middle of a circle, covering her ears with trembling hands.

Fire was all that loomed, taking everything with it. As apparently it always had. She just never noticed as it snapped at the hearth.

She did not sleep that night, nor did she the night after that when her parents finally sat her and Sokka down for a talk.

Master Uki was suddenly more interested in taking on more students, training them for a battle they would have to fight and that she could not see. Katara was constantly praised for her talent, her technique, the style she had almost mastered at such a young age.

But all she could think about was the excitement on Aang’s face when he let everyone know that she was a healer. The feeling of a heartbeat beneath her fingers as they were tangled in Appa’s fur, the joking way Gyatso presented a cloudberry fruit tart to her that he had made just after he had pretended to eat it by himself.

She would never see them again.

The warriors trained nonstop with her father and his other men. Bato who had been appointed second-in-command, was the one that taught the inexperienced ones how to build their own mines and bombs. He did so with duty on every line of his body, and with none of the lighthearted enthusiasm he had when he had played with she and Sokka when they were younger.

Ships docked at the harbor, but not to trade. They were large, massive with indigo sails lashing in the wind. War ships, she was told. Some of them left in smaller fleets. To where, she was uncertain. She watched as people said goodbye to their husbands, their brothers, their sons. If they were sixteen or older, they volunteered. There were few that did not.

Waterbenders trained and trained, some went with the men and others stayed behind to protect the capital.

Winter crept up on the tribe, and with it the freezing chill that she used to welcome. Winter was the season that strengthened her waterbending, but this year all she wished was to go back in time. To the beginning of summer. She wanted to tell Aang that he should stay with them. Stay with her.

Her Gran Gran pulled her aside on the solstice, a grim expression on her face. “Keep this amulet close, Katara,” she said. She placed a shape into Katara’s gloved hands. Her mittens curled around it. “You will need its protection,” she added. It was a wooden carving that took the form of a black cormorant, the namesake of her home. The bird that dives into the sea. “Sew it into your clothes.”

The way she looked at Katara told her that there would be no arguing. Not this time. Her gaze was chipped ice, her wrinkled mouth a hard line. Katara took the amulet without a word and stitched it into the fold of her parka’s sleeve.

-

Katara was twelve years old when the war breached her home. They had gone an entire year without interference, only an undercurrent of trepidation as each shadowed ship appeared on the skyline or a messenger arrived late at night and out of breath.

Snow mixed with ash. Smoke blanketed the sky like the beginning of a typhoon, churning in the distance.

All the children, sick, and elderly were sequestered away into what they hoped were secure winter houses with entrances that we long, narrow, and sunken passages. The people that could fight prepared themselves for whatever would come. She and Sokka huddled together in a corner, standing on a pile of polar leopard furs. Kya brought them close to her chest, and she was the warmth that kept Katara grounded at that moment.

Her mother fingered the carved pendant with the swirling pattern of water around her neck, the sea glass beads sewn into Katara’s collar, the whale bone bracelet around Sokka’s wrist.

“The dark spirits slip through the beads’ holes, away from you,” Kya murmured, lip quivering ever so slightly. “Remember that. Remember that if not anything else, our ancestors protect you.” 

Katara had told the same thing to Aang over a year ago, but nothing had protected him.

“I love you both,” Kya said, and pulled them tighter to her.

There was nothing else to do but wait.

Soon after, the shouts began. Rumbles echoed along the walls, and babies cried. The ground shuddered with explosions. There were the clashes of metal upon metal, shrapnel bursting forth and hitting structures.

A warrior burst in. “They’re headed this way!” he bellowed, frantic. His navy armor was covered in soot. “Head for the hills!”

There was a rush of movement. Kya shoved her and Sokka forward and toward a back exit. Gran Gran led them along among the crowd. They were trapped in a stampede, limbs crossing, feet running. It was all Katara could do to keep her family in sight while her father led their army as chief.

She thought she heard someone say they would distract them, but she was too caught up in getting out that she was not sure if it was just another voice in the throng of hysterical people.

Speckles of cool snow splattered against her cheeks. She stumbled through dead brush, tangled leafless weeds. She heard spurts of flame behind her, coloring the thickening snow with ugly slashes. Panic bubbled up through her center. She picked up the pace, her brother at her side, cinders in her mouth.

They made it as far as the top of a knoll a half mile away from Oqaatsut when she realized that her family was incomplete.

 _No, no,_ she thought, searching through the weather that was rapidly turning into a blizzard.

“I’m going to find mom!” she screamed, her stomach clenching in worry.

“Wait!” she heard Sokka yell. “Katara, don’t!”

She did not listen.

She ran, and she might have used her waterbending to do it because there was no one behind her that dared to follow. She slid through the icy storm, shards cutting her cheeks, her forehead. All she could think of was her mother, and how she could not lose someone else that she loved. Not now. Not ever. Not when she had the power to save them.

When she returned to the winter house, she saw the Fire Nation soldiers had retreated behind a fog of explosives and hollering Water Tribe men. There were bodies strewn on the floor. She looked around, seeing only a sea of red.

The winter house was defiled, overturned, ruined. Items broken or damaged beyond repair, helmets thrown to the side, pieces of plated armor cast off in what must have been an arduous battle. Her eyes roamed over everything, relief flooding her when she could not see her mother.

She walked into a room that had its door swung ajar, closest to the entrance passage. A soapstone lamp was overturned, and a line of fire burned through the embroidered fringe of a rug, rising steadily.

Katara raised her hand to her mouth, bile rising to her throat.

There, on a tattered fur pelt was her mother. Her profile was limned by the chasing flame. There was nothing left of her but a burned husk and blood. Eyes open, blank, staring at nothing, crimson dribbling from her chin and the corners of her mouth, a hole in her chest like a black chasm void of light.

Her arm was poised under her head, straight out. It was broken, bruised.

“NO!” Katara sobbed.

For a moment, it was as if she could not comprehend what was happening. She thought that it must have all been a sick joke, a terror tale that Kya or her grandmother would tell her for disobeying them. But the ash on her fingertips was too coarse, the smoke too all-encompassing, the blood too thick on her skirt.

She fell to her knees, gathering the ice from the walls, the snow that had blown inside, onto her hands. She tried to make them glow, to heal her mother, her comfort, her hope. However, when the water did glow, nothing happened. She was left to bear witness to the shell of a woman that she had adored, looking at the way she had lost her life so violently.

The water collapsed, splashing to the floor. Katara turned her head and everything in her stomach emptied.

She sat there, waiting. Until her father found her surrounded by death and the revolting stench of her own insides.

-

Katara fiddled with the pendant that sat atop her collarbone. She did not want to remember what it meant that she now wore it.

“This should be yours,” her father had told her the same day her family let the Mother of the Ocean have the body of her mother. “This necklace…it’s all we have left of her.”

And it was, she supposed, all that was left.

She lived in a world without her mother and she forgot about everything else. There were no stories to tell, no myths to listen to. She could not care less if there were spirits in the trees or creatures that danced in the stars. There was no magic left to believe in, no foolish adventures to want.

She found herself at the outer edge of Oqaatsut where the trade port was, envisioning what it had been like so many years ago when it had been full of life and color. She sat on the end of a dock, seeing not for the first time the crest of the midnight sun as spring bled into the summer season. The crown was yellow upon the hills, casting lengthier shadows on the remnants of her home, her tribe.

She raised a hand. The water did not lift with her gestures. She could not waterbend. She had not been able to for months now. How could she when there was nothing she could heal?

Her toes skimmed the shallows, cutting through the ocean of the bay like daggers. She had blood on her hands, steel in her heart.

Her father had become distant, and then finally, he told she and Sokka that he had to leave to fight at the request of the Northern Water Tribe. After the south had been torn asunder, the north needed all the help they could receive, especially when many of their ships encroached on Western Earth Kingdom territory. Bato stayed behind to lead, and Sokka followed his shadow like a polar bear dog cub.

The watchtowers were erected and the waterbenders formed units of extra protection. Master Uki tried to get her to bend again so that she could help, but there was nothing she could do. Not when Katara could no longer feel the tides through her veins, the connection to the full moon as it rose.

She closed her eyes and let the emptiness take over. _I am nothing and I am no one,_ she thought. _I am nothing and I am no one. No one._

_There is no one to save._

_There is no one to save._

_There is no one to save._

And then, she was falling. Her limbs were weightless, her voice a mere breath upon another’s lips. Listless, like the moment was taken from her in a second and a wordless command.

She was standing on the black sands of the beach to the north of her home, the grains rough against her bare feet. She was not cold, nor was she warm either. The sky was white, cloudless. A wisp of air flickered across her cheeks. The water licked the shore, taking and taking.

There was a rush, a slice, a creature, and then a horde of them. Sprinting like headless animals across the beach and into the ocean. Boney, deformed, teeth that were sharper than a barbed bird arrow’s, and far more deadly looking. Some had faces of deep-sea anglerfish, others with the slithering bodies of poisonous mink snakes. Scaly, hairless, covered in fur. They came and they creaked, ugly digits and all, shrieking past her and slinking into the brine.

“Vengeance, vengeance!” came the silky, unhinged voices. Hundreds of them, if not thousands echoing in her head.

Across the way, the shadow of someone that stood far from her. A flash of orange, and then it was gone.

She stepped forward, reaching for the bright spot that had left her, and fell into an abyss. Her shout was snared in her throat, and she choked on it.

Something caught her, and she twisted, turning, wanting if anything to see what had stopped her from crashing into the unknown. A shape moved in the dripping cave she had appeared inside of. A pale oval face, ruby red lips, painted circles around intrigued-looking eyes. The thing smiled at her, but Katara did not feel reassured.

Instead of startling, she found her words and spoke. “Where am I?” Katara asked.

The strange thing laughed a rumbling sound, and there was something otherworldly about it. Unnerving. It placed her on the damp ground, and Katara realized that she had been caught on one of its many pointed legs. Its body was coiled, curving, a gigantic centipede’s.

“You’re soul-faring,” said the thing. It blinked and its face changed into that of a beautiful woman’s with long, flowing hair. “In the Spirit World. A rather rare sight for a human.” 

She turned to face it fully. “Who are you?” she inquired. Oddly, she did not feel the fear she should have.

“Koh,” it said. “I am he who takes. I am the spirit they call The Face Stealer.”

“Are you going to steal my face?”

The spirit blinked again, and this time it had the face of a red demon’s, its tusks peeked out from plump lips. “Stealing faces is not at all as simple as you humans make it out to be,” intoned Koh. “I steal the souls behind the faces. I take the essence of what that being was, who they were, and make it my own.”

She lifted her hand, seeing nothing move with her will. No water to command, to live with. “Why can’t you take mine?”

Koh seemed to observe her, enclose her, moving like a snake and an insect all at once. The _click-clack_ of his many legs tapped on the walls, the floor. “You have yet to show me any emotion,” he remarked. “You have nothing left inside of you, and therefore nothing left for me to take. It would be an empty promise, a soulless trade.”

He paused, face shifting again in front of her. She stared back at the façade of an elderly man with golden eyes. “You find yourself here, traveling as a lost soul, trapped in a world of your own making,” he continued. “Yet you still have no idea why.”

“Wake up,” Koh smirked, “and then you will have something for me to take.”

Katara opened her eyes. She was still sitting at the dock. The ocean remained still underneath her. There was a chill in the air now. Hours must have passed.

-

Katara found a peculiar carving in a dead warrior’s home as she was assisting her grandmother in cleaning it up. His family did not want to have extra possessions, she was told. Not when there were others that might have needed the furs more.

She lifted it up, cradling the grotesque thing in her hands like a delicate newborn. She turned it this way and that, feeling for the intricate grooves, the sharpened teeth that were ragged behind a fishy maw. It had four legs and was hunched over with a back so bent that it might have cut the figure in half.

“A vengeance spirit,” informed her grandmother when she looked over Katara’s shoulder. “Perhaps the warrior must have made it in secret, or maybe his family. I suspect there are many of those hiding around here now.”

“Hiding?” asked Katara, dropping the statue.

Her grandmother nodded. “There is much that our people want revenge for,” she replied. “Even the Fire Nation cannot hide from the spirits.”

Katara could not banish the thoughts, the ideas from her mind that night. She tossed and turned in her pallet, ignoring the snores of her brother. Her fingers hurt from the sewing she had done that day and the repairs she had made on his trousers.

She focused on the bleeding and wondered if maybe this was how she got herself to waterbend again. If only she concentrated on the red of her blood, the beating of her own heart.

_Thump._

_Thump._

_Thump._

The warmth upon her skin, the sticky tresses against her forehead. The murky waters that surrounded her ankles, her knees. She waded through roots and trees she had never seen before. They were tall and imposing, covering the fiery sky with their branches. She hated the sky. All she could see were the streaks of unforgiving flame. She could taste the ash that shrouded her vision and coated her tongue.

Anger, and that was all. Floating above her head like a need, a burning want. She searched and searched for a piece of driftwood. She reached into her sleeve for a pocketknife. When she found something acceptable, she hoped that she could whittle something from scratch.

She sat on top of an arching root, so tall that it could have been a doorway. Her legs dangled from it, and she seethed.

Four legs for the four temples that were burned to nothingness, popping blank eyes for the vacant stare of her mother. Six legs for the bison that had been slaughtered. Another set of wrinkled creases for the old man that had died. A spear for the warrior and his family that was left behind. A fish tail for her father that left her for the sea.

Flicking her wrist, she went. Seeing something form and wishing for it to be as hideous as possible.

“What’s that?” a sudden voice interrupted her.

She turned around, eyes wide. Gray eyes met hers, and a curious stare.

“A spirit,” she sputtered out, “for revenge.”

The person behind her sighed and seemed to sag. “There’s so many of those,” they said. “It makes me sad.” A pale hand grabbed hers, the same one that held the whittling knife. “You’re nice…I can tell. It’s sad you’re making one.”

The knife clattered from her grasp, descending into the swamp below.

-

She stood beneath the light of the full moon three years after the war started, and two since she had lost her mother. Sometimes she thought she could remember what was like to be one with the water again, to feel the push and pull that she could no longer sense.

On occasion, she could concentrate so much that she appeared somewhere she knew she was not. A great beast would greet her, or a dragon. Then, there was that mysterious figure that flickered in and out of existence, that showed up when she least expected it.

“I’m lost,” they would say when she asked why they were there too. “I don’t know where else to go but here.”

She would see color sometimes. Yellow. Orange. Blue. She would blink and they were gone.

“I’m lost too,” she told the figure.

They might have laughed at the banality of it all, a togetherness that only she and that shadow could understand. It was not a panacea to her troubles, nor was it an answer to the calls she thrashed about at night. But somehow, that spirit she had no name for was someone she had familiarity with and that was all that mattered.

-

Katara was fourteen when she saw the spirit again.

They were well-formed now, sharper, different. They had tattoos and she was surprised. A spark of blue on milky skin. Arrows.

A deep memory she had almost forgotten wanted to resurface. It throbbed and it ached, pressing onto her skull like the heavy beat of a wartime drum. A flash of something, a tundra and snow. It hurt and it hurt, and she wanted it to stop.

The spirit was looking at her, tilting its bald head. Around its wrist, a set of beads. Darkness went toward them in tendrils and ribbons, then exited on the other side. It was almost as if it were a portal of some sort, a sponge that had absorbed ink and reversed the process.

“The beads keep the dark spirits away,” she said without thinking.

The spirit looked less like a shadow now, and its features hardened and solidified. There was a face, a young one. One she thought looked familiar.

“It’s fun to get surprised,” the spirit said.

And its lips formed words she could not hear, its eyes shed tears she could not comprehend. Behind it she saw towering temples on fire, dead and bloodied bodies on the ground, screeching children with arrows lodged in their backs, infants beheaded in front of her.

Amidst it all was a boy. Alone. Screaming.

A glow of white and blue light, a thunderous explosion that shattered windows, toppled columns. A man lifting this boy onto a flying bison, heavily injured himself. Elements flying about. A tornado, a storm of fire, quaking earth, shards of ice.

Cave after cave, mountain after mountain. Hair growing, starving, moving without stopping to rest.

Katara could not take it. The vision was too much. She yelled until her voice was sore with it, and then she looked again to see the spirit before her. No, the boy.

“Aang?” she whispered, and he gasped at his name.

“I forgot,” he said. “I forgot that was my name.”

Her hand brushed against his acolyte robes, and he vanished.

-

She was the happiest when she saw him. The boy. That was something she recalled from what seemed to be so long ago. She had forgotten, and shame was second nature to her when she realized that she had forgotten his name as well.

She never understood what an Air Nomad’s blessing was until he had given one to her.

Katara sat alone across from the floes where Sokka and her father used to go hunting for birds. The moon was high in the sky, and bright white. It was a waxing gibbous, so close to being full. Just another night or so, and she could try again.

She lifted her hand, concentrated on the stars above, the winds in her hair.

A sharp pang went through her, and she was imprisoned.

_There is no one left to save._

_No one._

_No one._

He appeared before her. This time, in front of a massive leafless tree that reached its branches so far into the boundless heavens that it looked to be a part of them. There was chittering in the background, a buzzing of dragonflies that zipped by.

Aang crouched before her, taking her hand. “Here,” he murmured. “You need this more than I do.” He gently tugged at her palm that held tight onto her skirts and opened it one finger at a time. He tried to place his bracelet into her hand.

“I don’t need it,” she refused, pulling away. “What I need is to save someone.”

He frowned. “Who do you need to save?”

“My mother,” she retorted, breathing hard. She stopped to peer at him. “You,” she added. “It’s the only way I can live with myself.”

Aang shook his head, cupping her hands in both of his. He slipped the bracelet into her grasp again. “That doesn’t sound like living,” he said. His shoulders drooped and he looked somewhere far away. “I think I know that now.”

Put off guard, Katara crinkled her eyebrows. “Know what?” she pressed.

“I was away for a long time…” he trailed off. “I need to wake up.”

There was a moment of stillness, of silence. The creatures and spirits that inhabited the tree and the areas around it did not make any more noise. He smiled at her, mellow, and maybe a little pained. “You need to wake up too,” he said.

Aang’s form shone white, his eyes and tattoos silvery blue against the sepia of the Spirit World. Fallen leaves spun around him. First, as if on a playful breeze, then on a swarm of life. Samara seeds whirled around from the offshoots, spinning like tops, and he was gone.

Katara slipped backward, and a voice she knew sounded pleased as it spoke. “Wake up, Katara of the Southern Water Tribe. If even the Avatar was found in his grief, then you can be found in yours.”

She thought she saw the white face of a many-legged creature as it grinned at her.

“Wake up now, so I can have something to take.”

-

On the winter solstice was when Sokka hollered at the mishappen figure in the sky, a blackened blob that grew in size even behind the steady curtain of snow that streaked across the gray sky. There were shouts of alarm, cries from below. Oqaatsut was alive with action, and warriors and waterbenders alike swarmed into formations, ready to fight.

A spear of ice flew at the shape, and it maneuvered away, seeking a clear route toward them. The waterbenders shot out more packed balls of ice, jagged sheets, bullet rain. Katara could only watch from behind a wall, helpless.

There was a roar. Katara gasped, and then she was running away from her safe spot. Jumping over piles of powdered snow, leaping past warriors that begged for her to return. But she ignored even her brother’s calls.

She waved her arms, desperate. She pushed aside men and women alike. “Aang!” she called. “Aang!”

Another ice shard sliced through the air, and through the bison had moved away in time before it was skewered, there was still a grunt.

“Stop!” Katara called. “Please! It’s Aang!”

She skidded to the barricaded entrance of her home, chest pounding, muscles on fire with adrenaline. The bison landed, crushing past walls _._ She looked up and met the eyes of an elderly man. Her heart sank.

He slid off, hobbling. His auburn robes were in disarray, and his shaggy white hair met with an unkempt mustache. He tilted to his side, and Katara noticed for the first time that he seemed to have a permanent limp.

He smiled at her, wide and caring. “Katara! It is so good to see you!” cried the man.

Katara stilled, and so did the rest of the warriors at her back.

“Gyatso?” she asked, disbelieving what she was seeing.

There was more shuffling. Then another voice met her ears. “It’s been a long summer,” Aang said. His tone was different, a little deeper, and he was taller than when she had last seen him. His master tattoos made him look older.

Katara collapsed onto the ground, her whole body shaking. She saw the tips of his boots enter her vision. “It was you the whole time,” she murmured, gulping. “You were always there for me, even when I didn’t know it. Even when I thought you were gone.”

He helped her stand up, and she was reminded of the first time they met. “It was us,” he responded with a smile. “Both of us.”

When she saw Aang anew, it was as if she was seeing him the first time again. The silver of his eyes, the quirk of the corner of his mouth, the way he still had the boyish charm about him that made her feel the joy of her childhood. She noticed the little tear in his sleeve, the red that bled from it. Without thinking, she touched him there, and the snowfall accumulated onto her hands. She healed him, and the liquid swirled back into the storm.

“I have to end this war,” he said. “It’s not over.”

“It’s not,” she agreed.

“But we found each other again,” he laughed softly. Just for her.

“Yeah. We did,” she said, and she hugged him close. She felt the bracelet she had given him all those years ago twine around her wrist. She felt the cormorant stitched into her sleeve. Just like a cormorant, she had dived into the sea. It was turbulent, messy, dark and deep. She had to find a way to provide life for herself.

In her arms, she held a soul just like hers that had forgotten what it was like to live. Aang had dived into his own sea too, but this was a current they could ride together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment and/or kudos down below!
> 
> I am not myself a native individual nor do I have a native or Inuit (or related) culture. If I have made any glaring missteps here, please let me know, especially if you are of one of these cultures! All I have going for me is that I have a Greenland book.
> 
> Some notes:  
> -The Mother of the Ocean is loosely based on the Inuit spirit of the ocean called Sedna. She was a woman who was thrown off a kayak she was on with her father in a storm because her father did not want to drown. It's said that she became a powerful spirit at the bottom of the ocean and allows sea creatures to come to the surface for consumption, but she should be given offerings to appease her.  
> -The amulet being sewn into clothes is based on a Greenlandic tradition in which people sew amulets and charms into their clothing for various reasons like growth or luck.  
> -This chapter elaborates on beads lore. Here I use "dark spirits." Really, it is usually referred to as "evil spirits."  
> -The vengeance spirits are based on another Greenlandic tradition. These are carvings are called tupilaq and they are typically made by a shaman or with witchcraft of some sort and are made to be monstrous creatures made of bone or animal parts that go after an enemy.

**Author's Note:**

> Some notes:
> 
> -Uki is an Inuit name I found meaning "survivor".  
> -Oqaatsut is the name of a real town in Greenland that used to be called Rhodebay. Its name means "cormorant".  
> -The beads lore is influenced by real Greenlandic tales. More to come on that later.  
> -The tales and stories Katara mentions early on in the story about the souls in the mountains are also influenced by real Greenlandic stories.


End file.
